Sydney, Melbourne urged to prepare for 50C days by end of century

Sydney and Melbourne have been warned to prepare for scorcher days reaching 50 degrees Celsius by the end of the century — even if global warming is contained to the Paris Agreement target of a 2C increase.

A new study led by Australian National University (ANU) climate scientist Dr Sophie Lewis has projected daily temperatures 3.8C above existing records for the two cities and even hotter extremes.

"We have to be thinking now about how we can be prepared for large population groups commuting to and from the CBD on these extremely hot days, how we send young children to school on 50C days, how our hospitals are prepared for a larger number of admissions of young or old people, and how our infrastructure can cope with it," Dr Lewis said.

The study found containing global warming to 1.5C — the more ambitious target set by the Paris Agreement — would limit extreme heat, but Dr Lewis said angrier summers were inevitable.

"A lot of warming is locked into the climate system and we really have to be prepared for extremes in the future to get much worse than they are now," she said.

"We've already seen an increase in excess heat deaths in heatwaves in 2009, due to those extreme heatwaves, and that's likely to occur even more under these 50C days."

Pockets of Australia have tasted temperatures close to 50C, mostly remote country towns.

But Dr Lewis said heats like that would look very different in Sydney or Melbourne.

"In the city we have a lot more concrete and a lot less air flow, there's a lot less ability to escape from the heat," she said.

The ANU study only analysed Bureau of Meteorology data from Sydney and Melbourne, but Dr Lewis said all of Australia could expect to see hotter extremes in the future.